Russell Jacoby "Dogmatic Wisdom."

Jacoby charges that academic debates over multiculturalism, politically correct language, free speech and curriculum are largely diversionary, shifting attention away from more pressing problems. The rising costs of education, fewer teachers, declining resources, alienated students, the gentrification of higher education (i.e., the increasing dominance by the wealthy of select universities)--these are issues we should be focusing on, Russell argues.

Puncturing conservatives' frequent charges that corrosive relativism and left-liberal views have taken over the campus, Jacoby does an expert demolition job on Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" and Dinesh D'Souza's "Illiberal Education."

At the same time, he cautions that cultural pluralism on campus may foster a new parochialism, fueling hostility and divisiveness as "African-Americans study African-Americans; Latinos study Latinos; women study women." Jacoby ("The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe") charges that the education and culture wars have misled America, diverting public attention from the real ailments that beset education and society. Upbraiding conservatives for hypocrisy, academic radicals for cynicism, and liberals for nanvetT, he recalls the realities of teaching and learning that the ideologues ignore.

Hardcover. 1994.

Like new. Very good, nice and clean.

See also: Michael Medved "Hollywood Versus America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values."